*This is a sometime place not an all the time place…* Summer 1981: Brady’s grandmother vanishes—along with an entire West Texas town. There’s no explanation, except those that don’t hold any logic. Brady doesn’t worry too much about that, having spent his childhood listening to his grandmother’s stories and playing with the pencil-sketched ghosts in her old Victorian: the young Shirley, the injured cowboy Glen, and others. *People slipping away into another world is fantasy. It’s impossible.* Summer 2025: Brady returns to his grandmother’s house, hoping to understand what happened, and to find out exactly where his grandmother went. Brady holds a hope close to his heart: That he can duplicate whatever magic his grandmother conjured, to follow in her footsteps as his own ghost-tattered life comes to its close. *I was there. I know what I saw…* "Summer in the House of the Departed is a golden-edged tale of the bond between a boy, his eccentric grandmother, and her ghost-filled old home. Rountree gives us the type of story we've come to expect from him: rich, poignant, and delightfully bittersweet. I loved it." — Chris Panatier, author of The Redemption of Morgan Bright